IBM saving $270 per Mac in support costs, says Apple's Tim Cook
IBM is benefiting hugely from its internal Mac adoption program, saving about $270 per Mac versus Windows PCs, Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a Tuesday fiscal results call.
IBM already has over 30,000 Macs in circulation and is adding about 1,900 more each week, Cook remarked. The savings are allegedly due to reduced support costs.
At a JAMF conference earlier this month, IBM claimed that only 5 percent of its Mac users need help desk support, compared with 40 percent of its Windows users. The company is paying a higher upfront cost for Macs, but expects to save money in efficiency and not using as many tech support workers.
In July, plans were announced to deploy roughly 50,000 MacBooks at IBM by the end of 2015. Ultimately, the company should hit between 150,000 and 200,000 units.
Once rivals, Apple and IBM have developed deep ties since the summer of 2014, when they launched the joint MobileFirst program to sell iOS-based apps and platforms to the enterprise market.
IBM already has over 30,000 Macs in circulation and is adding about 1,900 more each week, Cook remarked. The savings are allegedly due to reduced support costs.
At a JAMF conference earlier this month, IBM claimed that only 5 percent of its Mac users need help desk support, compared with 40 percent of its Windows users. The company is paying a higher upfront cost for Macs, but expects to save money in efficiency and not using as many tech support workers.
In July, plans were announced to deploy roughly 50,000 MacBooks at IBM by the end of 2015. Ultimately, the company should hit between 150,000 and 200,000 units.
Once rivals, Apple and IBM have developed deep ties since the summer of 2014, when they launched the joint MobileFirst program to sell iOS-based apps and platforms to the enterprise market.
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"It is 1958. IBM passes up a chance to buy a young fledgling company that has invented a new technology called xerography. Two years later, Xerox was born, and IBM has been kicking themselves ever since."
For years Apple fans have been crying in the wilderness about TCO and how Macs are NOT overpriced when you factor in reliability, support costs, hardware longevity. Nobody listened and we all sat there at our desks with cheap plastic or metal gray boxes with Dell or HP stickers on them, boxes we were constantly calling tech support about because they crapped out when our reports were due. I remember watching some tech support dude work for hours on my desktop PC because Outlook wouldn’t connect to the corporate network properly. I had to go out in the equipment room to find a working machine I could use to get my timesheet in that day.
Given how CFOs and "finance" in a company make IT decisions (or greatly influence them) I'd expect this to continue to pick up speed as a story over the coming months. IBM seems "all in" so I expect more supporting stories that show Apple products in a good light, I expect quite a lot of companies to follow. It will be very interesting to watch this space.
Windows PC's are a mess in comparison to Macbooks. I have a gaming PC but heaven knows if i'm doing anything else but gaming, it's on my Macbook or Chromebook.
Because there's literally nothing I need to do...Power it on and use it. Windows 10 interface is still gross amalgamation of touch based and mouse based actions that really don't make a whole lot of sense. I'm fine playing the latest Battlefront on it, but that's about it.
Given how CFOs and "finance" in a company make IT decisions (or greatly influence them) I'd expect this to continue to pick up speed as a story over the coming months. IBM seems "all in" so I expect more supporting stories that show Apple products in a good light, I expect quite a lot of companies to follow. It will be very interesting to watch this space.
This should ultimately help grow IBM's services business since they now have the expertise in terms of deploying Macs at a large scale.
This should ultimately help grow IBM's services business since they now have the expertise in terms of deploying Macs at a large scale.
Yes, and just think about all those companies that are ripe to be turned into Mac houses - quite a pool of potential new work from which to pick! This is great for Apple and great for IBM, but not quite so great for Microsoft and the crap commodity device manufacturers.
It's still good for Microsoft, they won't sell Windows 10, but a boat load of Office for Mac 2016.
Pages/Numbers/Keynote are still way behind Office, and it will still be a hard transition for PC users as there are differences between the two. Accountants live and die by their Excel spreadsheets, no chance Numbers will do it for them in the near future.
I can say though that we did see less issues with end users who were issued Macs that were everyday Mac users vs the users who weren't as familiar with Macs. Hardware issues were biggest problem, & took up about 30% of the departments time when I took over. This was mainly due to the decision they made by purchasing mid range Lenovo's & buying Macs that cost twice as much. However after we made a stronger investment in the PC's & upgraded to more high end Dell XPS's we saw a sharp decline in Helpdesk tickets on the PC's & we are now seeing almost around the same volume of tickets as the Mac's that are in the same age range.
but but Mac is overpriced... Shut the F up. I haven't used Windows at home for 5 years and there's been no issue at all. My 2011 Mac Mini was just absolutely awesome with all music recording studio app installed...with 16GB RAM, it's running like charm since day 1 until now. My Macbook Pro is working machine at home for me....I just upgraded to MB Pro 2015 with Force Touch and loved it...PC? I never missed it and never will.
There is more to tech support than just buying a new high end machine. Trouble shooting OS X is far easier than trouble shooting any version of Windows. At my firm, we had someone bring in a flash drive from home where the person was working on a document. Unbeknownst to everyone the flash drive introduced a virus on our network, infecting a number of machines and stopping the workflow of a number of individuals. After several hours, the machines were finally disinfected. A new high end machine would not have prevented what happened. However, a Mac would not have spread the infection.
You will probably say that people should not be attaching a flash drive from home to a work machine. However, it happens all the time and it will happen again no matter how much instruction is given.
The switch from Windows 7 to 8 also introduced a whole new set of problems with the change in the GUI. I can absolutely guarantee that at my firm, if we switch out our Windows 7 machines for Windows 8, tech support will become quite busy. I have no experience yet with Windows 10, but it will still involve a great deal of change from Win 7.
I am not saying that poor and inexpensive hardware doesn't cause problems for IT. It certainly does. But attributing the vast majority of support issues to old and inexpensive hardware is a little disingenuous don't you think?
"It is 1958. IBM passes up a chance to buy a young fledgling company that has invented a new technology called xerography. Two years later, Xerox was born, and IBM has been kicking themselves ever since."
And about 20 years later, Xerox held the patents to a lot of the technology for the modern computer (in their PARC division) but instead of using the technology, they chose to license it to a young computer company and Xerox, like IBM, has been kicking themselves ever since.
It's still good for Microsoft, they won't sell Windows 10, but a boat load of Office for Mac 2016.
Pages/Numbers/Keynote are still way behind Office, and it will still be a hard transition for PC users as there are differences between the two. Accountants live and die by their Excel spreadsheets, no chance Numbers will do it for them in the near future.
Microsoft will, it is true, most likely still sell some Office for Mac, but there are other alternatives I think companies will begin to adopt. I've always contended that the Office suite of products is overkill for the vast majority of users - most people in an organisation simply don't need all the bells and whistles that Office provides (nor the bloat). Say what you will about iWork as a suite, but it's free and a company can always grant Excel or Word exceptions for people or departments who refuse to move off, but migrating to a new hardware platform is the moment you look at this and make comprehensive changes and there are competent alternatives besides iWork, including other free suites. If none of the free options are appealing, IBM has its own suite of products that they themselves use. IBM used to be one of the big players in this space before Microsoft took over with their Windows/Office ELA racket. I'm sure IBM would be happy to install MS Office, but they're not going to lead with that as a solution and the case study of themselves will demonstrate a very large corporate (one of the largest in the world) using something that isn't MS Office and doing quite well without it.
Interesting times, I personally like this story (disclosure: I used to work at IBM and prior to that was also one of the PowerPoint team after MS bought it, many years ago). It'll be interesting to see how many MS Office Windows licenses are converted to MS Office for Mac.
The only issue I see with these statistics of 5% vs 40% support & the average savings with the Mac vs PC for IBM is that they're comparing brand new Macs vs PC's that are several years old & more than likely not top of the line PC's.
I don't believe that's true. Their policy (I used to work at IBM) is that they replace machines every 2 years. The machines were at one time their own IBM machines, but then of course Lenovo took over and supplied machines which were the same as IBM machines, for awhile at least (it appears that didn't last otherwise this Mac switchover might never have happened). They never skimped on hardware, we always got the best and pretty much whatever we wanted.
We have been experiencing the same thing for years with Apple products. My IT department squirmed 10 years ago on the though of paying full price for Macs when they could get PC alternative for almost nothing. We are finding that Apple products have significantly less issues (still have some issues because you cannot fix stupid). We are also finding that as our aging workforce is turning over to younger generations they fix the issues themselves versus needing someone to come to their desk. I think this also contributes to the easy nature of Apple products. All good stuff. As I have said before if you do the right things because they are the right thing and not the easiest everything else will fall into place. This describes to a "T" what Apple is about.
It's still good for Microsoft, they won't sell Windows 10, but a boat load of Office for Mac 2016.
Pages/Numbers/Keynote are still way behind Office, and it will still be a hard transition for PC users as there are differences between the two. Accountants live and die by their Excel spreadsheets, no chance Numbers will do it for them in the near future.
Apple's products are not way behind Office, especially Keynote, which knocks the socks off anything Powerpoint ever envisioned. Too many people try and make Excel into a database program and end up with a huge mess that nobody else can maintain. I like Pages a whole lot better than Word because Word, like all Microsoft products, keeps trying to do what's "best" for me instead of what I want done. As others have said, Microsoft keeps adding unnecessary features that overburden the user. I'd challenge Office users to document how many of the features they actually use. I would bet Microsoft could strip 50% of them and the vast majority of people wouldn't even know they were gone.
Have you seen those swiss army (knockoff) utility knives with way too many tools. This is what Office has morphed into. Which ones do you really need?
We have been experiencing the same thing for years with Apple products. My IT department squirmed 10 years ago on the though of paying full price for Macs when they could get PC alternative for almost nothing. We are finding that Apple products have significantly less issues (still have some issues because you cannot fix stupid). We are also finding that as our aging workforce is turning over to younger generations they fix the issues themselves versus needing someone to come to their desk. I think this also contributes to the easy nature of Apple products. All good stuff. As I have said before if you do the right things because they are the right thing and not the easiest everything else will fall into place. This describes to a "T" what Apple is about.
Scott Adams, the author of the cartoon "Dilbert" wrote about his time at PacBell (the experience of course is what his strip is all about.) One of the topics was office supplies. Huge overhead of stock and a clerk to administer. Like the good engineer he is, he proposed a simple solution: give all employees $50 on jan 1 (prorate for new hires in later) to buy their own office supplies. If they buy less, they keep the difference. If they lose the pens, paper...tough. Fairly this was when $50 was worth a bit more, but you get the idea.
I see a great future for organizations to do this with IT support. Give a fairly generous cash payment up front to employees. Have them maintain their own tech. Watch how many people buy macs. Sure, many will buy a cheap PCs...right up until it fails.
If a mac book costs $500 more than the 'equivalent' (relatively speaking) windows PC and you save $270 in tech support fees then you're still $230 behind the 8-ball.